Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion
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Opinion page editor Rick Holmes and other writers blog about national politics and issues. Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of policy, news and opinion. This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Mass. As such, our focus starts there and spreads to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. Since successful blogs create communities of readers and writers, we hope the \x34& Co.\x34 will also come to include you.

“Frustrated by Israeli and Palestinian actions that complicated his furious effort to salvage foundering peace talks, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday exhorted leaders on both sides to ‘lead’ and to do so now to prevent the negotiations from collapsing…”

What is truly amazing about this statement is that Kerry misses the point that the “negotiations” are “collapsing” because no one but Kerry and Obama want these negotiations to proceed at all. This “process” is not high on the list of priorities of the folks involved, and the message they are trying to give Kerry and Obama is that they are not seeking this process.

This comes the same morning as a draft report of the OSCE on Ukraine, in which on the ground officials in Ukraine, state-wide, have concluded that nearly 70% of Ukrainians fundamentally reject the American-led reproach of Russia, which is an important trading partner with Ukraine and which has lots of close familial and business ties which would be at risk, not to mention that Ukrainians are nearly unanimous that they don’t want to be the battlespace between Russia and the United States. These same Ukrainians, even those in Kiev, seem to believe that the United States is pursuing its own agenda, not that of the Ukrainian people. In other words, this is Kerry and Obama’s agenda, not Ukraine’s agenda.

We’ve had lots of conversation about identifying the Obama foreign policy. Obama says that he doesn’t want the US to be the world’s policeman, and that countries should have a right to self-determination, even as Obama sticks his nose, and American pressure, into the business of other sovereign nations where that pressure and intervention appears to be unwanted. Enough is enough already. We have problems here at home. The mere fact that Obama, frustrated by Congress, has decided he’d rather war with Putin and Israel, is not the effective basis of a foreign policy.